A Nation of Wimps?

A couple of years ago a Psychology Today article raised the possibility that we are becoming “a nation of wimps.”

Perhaps it’s today’s playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And… wait a minute… those aren’t little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves.

So the article begins (read all about it)

While the case may be slightly overstated in the article, there is something to what the author sees in the dangers of “hothouse parenting.” Let me give you a couple more quotes and encourage you to read the entire piece on your own:

Parental protectionism may reach its most comic excesses in college, but it doesn’t begin there. Primary schools and high schools are arguably just as guilty of grade inflation. But if you’re searching for someone to blame, consider Dr. Seuss. “Parents have told their kids from day one that there’s no end to what they are capable of doing,” says the University of Virginia’s John Portmann. “They read them the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and create bumper stickers telling the world their child is an honor student. American parents today expect their children to be perfect—the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can’t get the children to prove it on their own, they’ll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are.” What they’re really doing, he stresses, is “showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit.”

And

Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they’ve never done it, observes Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of Putting Families First. “They’ve been told by their coaches where on the field to stand, told by their parents what color socks to wear, told by the referees who’s won and what’s fair. Kids are losing leadership skills.”

Sunday’s sermon text is from 1 Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath. David is mocked by his older brothers when he arrives in the Israelite camp of King Saul. “Go home, get out of here,” they tell their youngest brother. But young David doesn’t go home and he doesn’t get out of there. Instead, he finagles an interview with the king himself and says, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”
Saul said to David, “Go, and the LORD be with you.”

I’m not suggesting that we have our kids wrestle with lions and bears, but I do wonder if in our nation of wimps we are giving our children the adventurous opportunities that are needed not only to develop competent adults, but, especially, that are needed to create leaders after God’s own heart.

And what about the church? Do we provide the kinds of adventurous opportunities that are needed to create men and women and leaders after God’s own heart? Our church library has a controversial book with the provocative title, Why Men Hate Going to Church. In it the author argues that we have sanitized our faith, taken all the risk and all the adventure out of it. Men and boys, he argues, want a faith with challenges and hazards. I believe that women and girls need that kind of faith as well. (Read the stories of the Oregon Trail if you don’t think women are up to challenges and hazards!)

I sometimes wonder where my own faith might be had it not been honed through experiences in wilderness backpacking as a collegian and young adult – and through a very different kind of adventure in the favelas of Brazil.

I think of one of the families Becky and I visited in the favela this past summer. João and Silvia Bessa have become special friends over the years and we were honored to spend a long and leisurely Saturday afternoon with them in July. Our afternoon was a peaceful time of good conversation and good food. But we knew that on the other side of the steel gate that opens out of the small courtyard of their house and onto a dark and narrow alley is the violent and hopeless world of the favela. João and Silvia’s oldest son Junio is 18 and shares a tiny bedroom with his younger brother and sister. His top bunk is the only place in the world that Junio can call his own. Junio loves to read and his favorite book is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (Senhor dos Aneis). Junio dreams of the kind of adventure about which Tolkien wrote and to which, of course, God calls us in Christ Jesus. One of the reasons that Junio and so many other young men (and women) in Favela da Ventosa don’t hate going to church is because they know that to be faithful in their world is to live a life of risk and hazard. It’s not easy being a Christian in Favela da Ventosa, but Junio is preparing himself for the adventure.

David the shepherd boy faced lions and bears as he protected his father’s flock. God used those experiences as David defeated the Philistine champion who defied the armies of the living God.

A nation of wimps? A church of wimps? It’s not easy being a Christian in Beaver. Are you ready for some risk and adventure?